AT&T has apparently blocked DSL access to popular bulletin board and bad taste depository 4chan.
The image site is the home of LOLcats and thousands of other, less pleasant, internet images. The boards cover bizarre Japanese animation along with other rather niche adult content.
But apart from hosting weird tentacle porn the …

Internet Rules:

Come on guys

The reason - 4chan has been under sustained DDOS attacks, hence the blockage in an effort to curtail it - has been available online since last night. AT&T hasn't been the only ISP to block access - see http://www.merit.edu/mail.archives/nanog/msg19609.html. A good explanation for the reason behind it can be found at http://mailman.nanog.org/pipermail/nanog/2009-July/012198.html.

The story and proper reason has been available all over Slashdot, Reddit and the entire internets for the past +24 hours, so I'm frankly surprised you've released this story at 11:07am without checking those first.

I have not love for AT&T whatsoever, but I expected a bit more fact-checking from you guys.

FFFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUU-

Hackers

No...

4chan is currently under attack by a ACK DDoS attack.

The general principal: The attacker sends a SYN packet to Target A. This packet has a spoofed source address, pointing to Target B. Target A picks up the SYN request, and responds it it with an ACK packet. The ACK is sent to the spoofed source: Target B. Of course Target B didn't send the inital SYN, so it returns a RST to Target A (who is expecting a SYN-ACK). Inronically, some classic DDoS protection rules will filter out RST packets, causing Target A to send multiple ACK packets, making the DDoS more effective.

So you're getting two DDoS attacks for the price of one, and Target B has no idea who the REAL attacker is.

AT&T (and others) didn't shut down 4chan to censor it, they did it to protect 4chan itself and, more importantly the unknown Target B.

over hyped 4chan users meet their match

So all these 4chan users who boast about being the master of the internets and untochable because they go through 7 proxies have finally realised that actually they do depent on a ISP. The last laugh i think is on them!